UK police embarrassed after Romanian and Lithuanian farm workers freed in police swoop insist they were not ‘slaves’ and demand their jobs back.

Marcus Tanner BIRN London

A big police raid on farm in the west of England aimed at freeing 200 Romanian and Lithuanian “modern slaves” has turned into a PR debacle after the alleged slaves angrily marched on the regional police station to denounce the police action and demand their jobs back.

Modern slavery is a particular concern on UK Prime Minister Theresa May, and police in County Cornwall said they were acting on good intelligence when they descended en masse last Thursday on the farm at Manaccan village in south Cornwall, freed some 200 Romanians and Lithuanians and detained the farm owners.

But the much-hyped news of the police action promptly turned in an unexpected direction when about 100 of the freed Romanians and Lithuanians went by bus to the regional police station in Camborne to demand their boss and jobs back, and condemn the whole operation on local TV.

The Romanian spokesperson for the group, who called herself Marina Alina Florentina, said they had been coming to work on the farm for four or five years from January to March to pick daffodils, resented being called “slaves” – and did not want to be “freed”.

Others said they earned up to, and over, 200 pounds a day doing the intensive seasonal work in Cornwall before returning to Romania and the Baltic states – which, if true, is way above the average.

Average pay for unskilled work in the UK, in retail and hospitality, is normally closer to 50 pounds a day, or about eight pounds and hour.

“Our boss has been arrested and we think he has done nothing wrong. We have very good conditions,” Marina said.

The PR side of the operation began to unravel after media descended on the farm, expecting scenes of horror, only to find an unexceptional vista of plain but neat-looking heated caravans where the workers were housed.

One of the “freed” workers told the UK Daily Mail: “Of course we aren’t slaves kept here, we’re workers. In Lithuania it is very hard to find work, and it is bad money and very hard jobs. I earn in a day here what I would in a week at home.”

Defending the operation, the Police Chief of Devon and Cornwall Counties, Shaun Sawyer, has told the media that police acted on legitimate concerns, adding that 14 of the 200 workers had, in fact, requested assistance to leave.

While the operation in Cornwall appears to have gone awry, experts say modern slavery is a serious problem in the UK, involving thousands of people, mainly from Eastern Europe and the Africa, being trafficked into the UK each year, often to work as prostitutes, or to work for minimal pay in occupations such as car washes.